Tag Archives: Bud Anderson

To celebrate Memorial Day last Monday, I was fortunate enough to fly an iconic World War II warbird, the P-51D Mustang owned by the Collings Foundation. The Foundation’s nation-wide Wings of Freedom tour and its airplanes had landed at Livermore Municipal Airport, in California, for a three-day stay before moving on.

Photo: Collings Foundation

The experience was not only unforgettable, but very meaningful for me. As a student of aviation history, particularly in the World War II time-frame, going up in a P-51 was something I always wanted to do: more accurately, something I had to do!
What finally moved me to act was a quote by the author Mark Twain which I recently heard and (loosely) paraphrase here: You will regret most the things in life you did not do, not the things you did.

Many are the accounts of young farm boys in middle America scrounging a quarter and going up for the first time in the rickety biplanes of traveling “barnstormers” back in the mid-nineteen-thirties. For many of those boys, that experience led ultimately to flight training in the Army Air Force during the prelude to war. This adventure of mine felt somewhat like my own, personal, modern-day version of the barnstormer ride, but more costly and with no future flight training likely!

That’s me (bluejeans) with the father of my young pilot (he also flies)

The P-51 Mustang was the greatest fighter plane in World War II, bar-none. For that, and for so many other reasons, it is the one airplane I wanted to fly and experience. It is often claimed that the P-51 won the war for us. Most certainly, without its introduction to combat in 1943, many more B-17 and B-24 bomber crews would have lost their lives to enemy fighters which flew up to intercept the “heavies” on their bomb runs over hostile territory. The P-51 was the first fighter with the fuel-range capable of escorting our bombers all the way to their targets in Germany and back to their bases in England and Italy.

P-51s also proved their air superiority over the best the Germans had to offer. When enemy fighters came up to attack our bombers, the P-51s excelled in the oft-times, close-quarter aerial dogfights with their German Me 109 and Focke-Wulf 190 counterparts. The Mustang quickly won the hearts and gratitude of the brave men who flew her and survived the war along with their indelible memories of combat. As for the bomber crews who were such vulnerable targets, they universally referred to the P-51 escorts as their “little friends.”

Heading out to the taxi-way prior to take-off

Toulouse Nuts is a rare variant of the Mustang which features not merely a seat behind the pilot, but a second full set of instrumentation and controls like the pilot’s. For a good portion of my half-hour flight, I was in control of the airplane from my rear seat vantage point. For the rest of the flight, my young pilot performed some textbook aerobatics per my request: wingovers, aileron rolls, etc. He began by pointing the nose of the airplane up a bit and then partially rolling the airplane into a dive while 90 degrees to the horizon. After a few warm-ups (for my benefit), we nosed up, “came over the top” while rolling into a fully inverted flying position while diving and leveling out. That uneasy feeling one gets when a Southwest Airlines 737 banks into a steep turn with “wing way down” is but prelude to the feeling of doing wingovers in a P-51! I now have some inkling of what combat maneuvers in a life and death dogfight with a German Me 109 must have felt like to our pilots.

Steep climb and sharp bank at take-off (runway in the background)

I have read many memoirs of World War II aces who survived, thanks to luck and skill, to tell their stories. In recent years, much of my time and library acquisitions have been devoted to learning more about the histories of the men and machines who defeated Hitler’s Luftwaffe. As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I cannot conceive of more daring and dangerous, yet adventurous endeavors than those experienced by the bomber and fighter crews of World War II. A quote from one of the best, Clarence “Bud” Anderson, a triple Mustang ace (16.25 air victories) who flew 116 combat missions out of England, is embedded in my consciousness:

Staying alive was no simple thing in the skies over Europe in the spring of 1944. A lot of men couldn’t. It was a bad thing to dwell on if you were a fighter pilot, and so we told ourselves we were dead men and lived for the moment with no thought of the future at all. It wasn’t too difficult. Lots of us had no future and everyone knew it.

I wanted to experience, as best I could, what it must have felt like to ride out to the flight-line in a far-away place on a cold, early dawn, to greet your crew-chief who got up even earlier to prepare your plane, and then to clamber into the cockpit for yet another mission over Germany. Your crew chief helps you strap-in and briefs you on the status of your airplane. You look at him and he looks at you, briefly, each realizing that you might not come back from today’s mission. Then you close the canopy to form an eerie silence, and your crew-chief slides off the wing to the ground – perhaps the last human you will see…at least for several hours. At your touch of the starter, the big four-bladed propeller slowly turns, and turns some more, and turns some more, and finally the powerful, twelve-cylinder Rolls-Royce/Packard Merlin engine coughs and belches its way to life, shaking the cockpit in the process. In a matter of seconds, the big Merlin engine settles into a smooth, steady cadence and you are set to face the great unknowns that await all pilots on such missions.

To capture some essence of that scenario in a real P-51 Mustang is what drove me to do what I did last Monday. What better way to pay tribute to the memory of our flyers than to take to the skies over Livermore in a vintage airplane on an absolutely gorgeous, cloud-free day like Monday, May 28, 2018. It was everything I had hoped it would be, and more. I will never forget the experience.

I was supposed to fly at 11:00 am on Monday. I did not get airborne until 3:00 that afternoon. A problem with the fuel pressure gauge surfaced on the flight before mine. As Linda and I arrived at the field, I saw the airplane head off to the taxi-way for the 10:00 flight scheduled before mine. In less than two minutes, my heart fell as I saw the airplane taxi back to its parking position on the apron. I knew there must be some problem. Soon, pilot and passenger were out of the plane and the engine covers were off the nose of the airplane. The pilot and several others were all over the front portion of the plane. The previous flyer, an older fellow like me named John, stood around for at least three hours as did Linda and I. He indicated he would wait it out because, for him, the experience was “now or never.” By the time the crew had the airplane ready to go after heroic efforts on their part, John had given up, cancelled at the desk, and gone. The flight crew told me, “You are next-up,” to which I retorted, “Let’s go, then!” The fellow who flew after me was also older – at least my age. I sense that there are many older guys like me who feel the significance surrounding this airplane and its historic role while confronting the approaching decision point for themselves: to go do it or not.

I had written an earlier post on the Collings Foundation and their older P-51C, Betty Jane. She is currently undergoing a ground-up restoration/overhaul. The tour introduction of their newly restored P-51D Toulouse Nuts occurred in 2016. Technically, she is known as a TF-51D, being a rare, two seat, dual-control airplane. “T” for trainer and “F” for fighter, I believe, is the way it works. The “P” in P-51 is an outmoded reference for “pursuit,” nomenclature which was commonly used early in World War II and prior. Toulouse Nuts represents the “D” evolution of the airplane’s design, its ultimate configuration during the war. For pilots and would-be flyers/passengers like me, the bubble canopy of the “D” offers a superior visual experience compared to the birdcage structure of the earlier “C” models like Betty Jane.

An amazing, unforgettable experience!

Toulouse Nuts is one of three original TF-51Ds remaining in the world. She is painted in her original markings of the West Virginia Air Guard, 167th fighter squadron.

B-24 Liberator Bomber, Witchcraft – the last one flying of over 18,000 built!

The $50 gift certificate from Talbot’s Toyland in San Mateo, California had been burning a hole in my “pocket” for several months – reminiscent of my boyhood enthusiasms. A gift from my daughter Ginny’s family, I just redeemed it for a 1/72 scale, Corgi die-cast WWII British Spitfire airplane – and a beautiful little model she is!

This is the airplane that saved England in WWII by winning the Battle of Britain in the skies overhead. I knew about all of that, but a recent PBS documentary really drove home to me just how heroic and crucial the aerial combat over England at the opening of the war was in deterring Hitler’s Luftwaffe from devastating the country.

A Senior Citizen Lost in a Toy Store?

Yes, a toy store like Talbot’s can still thrill a seventy-four year old guy with its offerings. I have been a customer of Talbot’s in downtown San Mateo since 1955, the year it first opened its doors – in the very same location! I was fifteen years old, living a few miles from the downtown and still building model airplanes, buying plastic kits from Talbot’s and more substantial models from the venerable Hobby Haven several blocks across town. Now, sixty years later, Hobby Haven has long-since disappeared, but the greatly-expanded Talbot’s continues today as THE place in the entire region to shop for electric trains, RC airplanes and cars, educational toys, bikes, and everything else in between.

Things ARE changing, however. Many old-timers are no longer with us. As we disappear, so does the demand for airplanes that we knew so well from our youth, replaced in the young’s affections by space-age toys and conveyances from the post Star Wars era. I knew this to be true after noticing a relatively slow turnover of the “warbird” stock in the brilliantly illuminated display cases at Talbot’s. The long-term, friendly, and knowledgeable staff at Talbot’s confirmed that business in WWII aircraft has slowed considerably. My little Spitfire model had been on display for at least a few months, it seems, begging for an old-timer to come along, take it home, and lavish it with affection! I decided to be that “hero,” equally because I love the model’s graceful lines, its beautifully crafted detail, and because it is so historically relevant to the great history of WWII.

I have many personal accounts sitting on my bookshelves from the men who flew such aircraft in the war; their stories project unparalleled drama and adventure in a time and setting which can never be repeated. Unlike today’s trend toward automated drone warfare, these men actually climbed into a cold cockpit on some far away airfield, fired-up their coughing, belching engines, and taxied off to today’s mission and, often, into oblivion. Clarence E. “Bud” Anderson, one of America’s greatest aces flying the storied P-51 Mustang fighter expressed it succinctly, yet poignantly, in his fine book:

“Staying alive was no simple thing in the skies over Europe in the spring of 1944. A lot of men couldn’t. It was a bad thing to dwell on if you were a fighter pilot, and so we told ourselves we were dead men and lived for the moment with no thought of the future at all. It wasn’t too difficult. Lots of us had no future and everyone knew it.”

Today’s allure for youngsters involves Star Wars style spacecraft dripping with laser cannons and chock full of presumed, computer-based systems! That modern allure and fascination seems no match for the real-life drama of the “stick and rudder” men wearing leather helmets who flew their machines in both World Wars – no match, at least, for us old-timers. Those men survived to fly yet another day thanks only to their unconventional courage and skill at maneuvering to get the enemy’s “tail” within the line of fire of their machine guns, all the while insuring that another of the enemy was not closing in on their tail. Skill, daring, and “just plain luck” were each factors in the survival equation. But that was then, and today belongs to the young, though I cannot help but wonder if, in their old-age, today’s youngsters will view their boyhood passions in the same dramatic human light as we do. Perhaps so.

For me, this post is a collage of mixed messages: The wonder still present for all ages and interests, and both sexes (Talbot’s has a great doll department) in a really fine toy store; the fleeting vision over passing time of the receding culture which so influenced our childhood; our changing attitudes and outlooks; and, finally, the joy of still encountering a surviving link to our fondest personal memories and recollections. Talbot’s sixty year tenure and enduring influence in downtown San Mateo represents an uncommon, present-day reminder of who we were and what life was like, many years ago. I will think of all this whenever I gaze at my latest gem from Talbot’s.